Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have found widespread application due to their rapid wireless deployment potential, flexible network topology, low-cost maintenance, and large-scale radio coverage. Unlike Wi-Fi local area wireless computer networking technology, WMNs may not need cables between constituent wireless backbone nodes. These backbone nodes, which can be referred to as mesh routers (MRs), can serve as a tree root in networking terms. Each tree root MR can communicate with many different nodes in its tree. Each of these tree nodes can be called a mesh client (MC). The MC can use less resources (memory, CPU speed, link rate, and the like) than the MR. Moreover, MCs can send packets through the tree and reach a MR, which can reach another MR or use a gateway to talk with the Internet or other networks, as shown in FIG. 1.
Many of today's WMN products use omni-directional antennas. Omni-directional antennas can cause interference among neighboring nodes, excluding the specific node that the antenna intends to communicate with.
Directional antennas, on the other hand, can emit their energy within a small angle (called a beam). These directional antennas may not leak energy to neighboring nodes as long as they are not in the beam coverage area. Due to their well-focused energy, directional antennas can propagate the radio for longer distances than omni-directional antennas. However, directional antennas may only be able to target one direction at a time and can thus have blind-spots in other directions. This can limit the throughput performance of these types of antennas.
Multi-beam directional antennas (MBDAs), including multi-beam smart antennas (MBSAs), can overcome such limitations by allowing simultaneous packet transmissions in multiple beams in different directions. A MBDA can also simultaneously receive packets from multiple beams. The MBDA can moreover have lower associated costs than multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) antennas since no complex antenna control systems may be needed. However, conventional multi-hop wireless routing schemes may only search the shortest path between source and destination nodes. Such a scheme may only use one beam of the MBDA, and thus may not make use of other beams, leading to decreased throughput.
Therefore, what is needed are systems and methods for efficient routing in MBDA-equipped WMNs. The systems and methods can be used to maximize the throughput of a given routing scheme by exploiting the multi-beam transmission/reception capability of MBDAs.